Attempt to delete a question "for privacy"

Question

The OP has deleted the text from the body of this question and replaced it with "Apologies, deleted for privacy".

What should we do about this? Obvious choises to me are:

Revert the edit

The OP is obviously not aware that previous versions are still visible in the edit history. The edit is essentially vandalism. (A mod might have to lock the post in some way to prevent the OP repeating the edit.)

Delete the post

That would ensure that the previous version is only visible to 10k users (and not, in particular, to Google's spider).

Answer 1

An alternative is disassociating the post from the poster, which can be requested by them as described here: Could we have a Help Center page on disassociating posts?

As a moderator I can (and did) also ask for this from the CM team on behalf of the poster, which was done recently

Answer 2

In these cases it is important to flag the question to let a moderator know what is happening. Often a user will revert edits, deface other content of theirs or even content of third parties. If the community goes around fixing these things, a mod might never know about the bad behavior. So in summary, definitely flag the post. We can lock it, help the user disassociate the post, redacted the problematic content, and give the user a time out.

As for rolling the edits back, this is a personal call. If it seems like the user is trying to hide something (e.g., they posted some PII), I would leave the edit. While the PII would still be in the revision history and need to be dealt with, at least it is a little hidden. If it seems like everything was fine in the original version I would revert the edi, leave a comment, and flag the content.